


six hours to breathe again

by londer



Category: Dimension 20, Fantasy High
Genre: CW for blood + bodily trauma + kidnapping + some gore, Cyberpunk AU, Gen, Heists, Sci-Fi AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25320889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/londer/pseuds/londer
Summary: His stomach bubbles unpleasantly around the six flash drives he swallowed. Riz doesn't have a fucking clue what's on them or why they're important, only that Gorgug gave him a server bank number and told him to get everything, that Fig needs all of it. For Adaine. This is all for Adaine, they're going to get her back, finally, once and for fucking all, and then Riz is going to put a bullet in Biz Glitterdew's greasy fucking forehead.
Relationships: The Bad Kids & The Bad Kids (Dimension 20)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 85





	six hours to breathe again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [verdent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdent/gifts).



> For verdent, who sent in the original prompt for the ficlet that led to this AU! 
> 
> This rides the line between what I would tag as T versus M in terms of violence/blood/ptsd/trauma/body horror inflicted, so please look out for yourself. I'm a fainter about blood and guts and stuff, so nothing's too heavy but it is there.
> 
> This was *heavily* influenced by the fact that I've been bingewatching both star trek and leverage at the same time

**_Six hours out:_ **

Kristen drums her fingers on the console as she pilots the  _ Hallariel _ into orbit around Io. They're just barely out of range of any volcanic activity, but close enough that nobody will be able to isolate them on long-range sensors. 

"We're early," Fabian says, puts a hand on her arm to stop her fidgeting. "You know Gorgug is always late." 

"I  _ know _ ," Kristen says. She's not worried about Gorgug showing up; he's the best handler in all of SeaCorp and has never let them down in fifteen years of friendship since their Academy days. Tracker's making the extraction today. It's been ten years since any of them have seen Adaine, and nothing Fig's been able to dig up has been good. She might be dead, or completely soup-headed, or so deeply impressed into service that she might as well be either. "What do you think it is?"

"Hopefully not another supply run," Fabian says. "When my father, William Seacaster, asked me to go underground for the family company, I thought it was going to mean getting to go on  _ cool adventures _ and fight space battles and run the Kuiper Belt. I didn't think it meant flying around shipments of  _ wheat seeds _ and _ linen. _ " 

Kristen likes the supply runs. They're reliable and pay well. She doesn't say it because she knows they're both thinking the same thing. They want in on Adaine's rescue, want to be on the ground shooting hot or in the sky running the exit. Tracker told Kristen not to tell anyone about the extraction plan; Fabian doesn't even know and Kristen is ready to jitter out of her seat with the news.

Gorgug arrives five minutes late in a shuttle and the holocom channel between their ships crackles to life.

"Hey guys," the tiny holo of Gorgug says. He looks tired, hair scraped back bumpily into a little bun, two days' worth of scruff, bags under the eyes. 

Kristen waves to him, but Fabian pounces. "Gorgug. What's the new assignment?" 

Gorgug sighs, but he's smiling, just a little. "It has to do with Adaine." 

Kristen jolts up in her seat. "Holy  _ fuck _ . Did we find her? Is she safe?" 

"We don't know, and it's more complicated than that," Gorgug says. "There's a retrieval team out for her - no, Fabian, I can't tell you anything more than that. You're to meet up with Riz at the Phobos databanks in two hours. Comms code is alpha-delta-ficus-ficus-eight-three-two. Repeat, alpha-delta-ficus-ficus-eight-three-two. Get in quick, he'll need cover for his exit strategy." 

"Is that all?" Fabian asks impatiently, and Kristen agrees. "No other details?" 

"Go in armed," is all Gorgug says. He meets their eyes and it's the same old steady Gorgug who ripped a man's fingers off with his bare hands to get Adaine's location. "Be ready for a firefight and a fast getaway." 

**_Five hours out:_ **

Fig taps away at the keyboard before her in the cramped cockpit of the  _ Hangvan _ . Techno music - her own personal mix - blares out of the ship's sound system. If this were a movie, green lines of text would be spinning across the screen before her, but it's not, it's just the regular mundane black on white text of hacking a city mainframe. She skims through the different source code files until she finds where she can add herself as an administrative user for the system and then she's in, full access to all of it. It's not hard to find Adaine. She's Biz's greatest treasure, the focal point of his security. 

"I'm sending the blueprints to your retina chip," Fig says over the comms to Tracker. "There'll be a badge waiting for you at the east entrance of the tower. You'll be fine to get in and get to her, and I'm setting up your exit strategy now." 

"Copy that," Tracker says. 

Fig's terrified for all of this. For all of them, but mostly for Adaine. Ten years is a long time to spend in a steel tower, linked to an entire city. She's not the only girl the Glitterdews are using as a conduit, but she's the mainframe to it all. Adaine's the only one lucky enough to have people looking for her, lucky enough to have the Seacaster Corporation at her back. 

Adaine vanished on a cold Friday morning from Elmville, a small outpost on PC-II. She was supposed to be on assignment from SeaCorp, evaluating the port's security. They were thinking of starting a new trade route through the base. And then she was gone without a trace, full cold case. Days passed, then weeks, then months. The local law enforcement couldn't do dick all, and there were too many jurisdiction issues to continue on through normal means. SeaCorp spent millions of creds looking for her, more than they'd ever put into any other missing operative. 

Other operatives weren't Adaine Abernant. Other operatives weren't best in their entire class at Aguefort, a brilliant economist and security expert. Other operatives weren't their best friend, didn't go to school with the heir to the empire, didn't have him on speed dial, didn't have five blood-sworn friends who would rip the galaxy to shreds to find her. 

The trail stayed cold and they started to falter, but Riz insisted they keep looking so they did. Nobody gives up on family. Jawbone half wasted away from the grief of losing his daughter, but they fought on. 

And then Ayda found her on a security feed. Just the barest flutter of her blonde hair as she rounded a corner but it was enough to find another camera with more footage, to see her fighting desperately until the goons had subdued her and stuffed her into the back seat of a waiting car. Fig traced back the plates (stolen), then traced back the theft (amateurs), then traced back who hired the thieves (ten shell accounts but she could do it), then found it was Biz Glitterdew (of Glitterdew Enterprises) who took her best friend.

Years of desperate searching followed by months of desperate tracing then just days of chugging caffeine packs as Fig went through G-Ent's entire holdings. She narrowed it down to a few locations and Gorgug started carefully pulling strings to start poking around in G-Ent's business. 

They scattered when they found the information, Gorgug the only go-between them. Too much knowledge in one place is dangerous. It's been weeks since she's seen the others, but she knows they're out there, playing their parts in this mission. She doesn't need to know the details, it would only put them all in more danger. 

Fig sits in the tiny cockpit and gives Tracker and Adaine a way out. Blinding cameras, coordinating the city airlock schedule, placing the  _ Hangman _ exactly where Tracker will need it. She lays a safety net for every corner, slows guards, stops roads, carefully builds the latch to the trap to open from the inside. 

( **_four hours, thirty minutes out:_ **

Dayne loves it when people try to get into his facility. A good excuse to break out the riot gear. A better excuse to prove to his employers why they keep him on the payroll. 

An unauthorized someone is in the server bay. Some idiot hits the alarms and Dayne shoots him on the spot. Stupid motherfucker just gave away that they know someone's here. Whoever it is got past a lot of security already, but didn't manage to outsmart the individual server's alarms. 

The _ individual server alarms  _ \- fuck. Dayne is so fucked if he messes this one up because the only servers with alarms on them belong to the Glitterdew family. )

**Four hours out:**

A tritone hums in Riz's earpiece and he sits up a little in the server rack he's hiding in. "Gukgak here," he mouths, comms picking up the vibrations from his throat instead of any sound. 

" _ Riz _ ," and it's Kristen's voice. Thank god. Thank all the gods and the universe and the deepest pits of black holes. Gorgug really came through for him. "We're in orbit. What do you need." 

"Distraction," he says, because he really, really does, the klaxons in the building are wailing because he's an  _ idiot _ and almost got  _ caught _ and now he is crammed  _ inside  _ the rack and his cover is slowly ticking down around him. Footsteps echo through the warehouse and Riz can hear the clatter of rifles against body armor as the compound's security team works their way through. 

His stomach bubbles unpleasantly around the six flash drives he swallowed. Riz doesn't have a fucking clue what's on them or why they're important, only that Gorgug gave him a server bank number and told him to get everything, that Fig needs all of it. For Adaine. This is all for Adaine, they're going to  _ get her back _ , finally, once and for fucking all, and then Riz is going to put a bullet in Biz Glitterdew's greasy fucking forehead. 

"Got you," Kristen says. "Expect a big boom - that's east. Head north and we'll pick you up right outside." 

"Roger." 

He waits, thirty seconds, one minute, time ticks slow-quick down his spine. Riz eases himself out of the server bank, loads fresh clips into his guns, prepares to burst from this sector and run. A security team runs past his pocket and he freezes, ready to shoot, but they hustle past him. 

_ boom _

Steel crunches to Riz's right so he runs straight, up the long long corridor between stacks. There's shouting and the alarms have gotten even louder and everything is loud flashing lights and hazy smoke. Two guards turn onto his route and he dispatches them cleanly but now they've heard him and know where he is. He runs past their groaning forms, boulders a security gate and keeps going. 

Riz can see the edge of the warehouse through the smoky haze in the air now, rising tall and grey and steel before him. Another security team bursts into his path and he takes them out too, shoots two in the legs, one in the head, and pistol whips his empty gun across the face of the fourth before continuing to move. 

He gets to the wall and right-left looks for an exit. Fifty feet to the right, emergency exit door. He sprints for it, and a bullet grazes his elbow and he shouts with the hot pain of it but doesn't stop. Riz empties his clip behind him towards his pursuers and rams through the door, spilling out into the sharp artificial atmosphere that's been erected around Phobos. 

The  _ Hallariel  _ is hovering in the parking lot he's facing and a figure is at the cargo bay doors, arm outstretched. Riz runs, trailing blood from his arm - fuck, he'll have to do another DNA resequence after this, those hurt so fucking bad. His feet slap against the pavement and he ducks against another hail of gunfire. He grabs for the cargo bay and a hand catches his, yanks him inside and the hull doors slam shut and the ship shoots skyward. 

The pressure change and blood loss knocks him out a little. When he comes to he's lying on the floor shirtless and Fabian is sitting over him, covered in Riz's blood and applying medspray to the wound on Riz's arm. 

"Good to see you," Fabian says conversationally, as if he's not stitching Riz's arm back together. "When you're ready, there's a bucket and a puke pill waiting for you." 

**_(three hours, thirty minutes out:_ **

"Sir, she's gone," a security guard in a black suit says to Biz. Biz looks out the chrome windows of his penthouse over the streets of Bastion City. 

"Bring around my car," he says, picks up the tablet on the desk before him. "We're leaving." 

The man nods and ducks out of the room. Biz logs into the terminal control from his tablet, sets a thirty minute timer on some malware to take out the city's enviro controls. A terrible thing, but what else can he do? He takes a photo of himself and Adaine, back in their college days, out of the frame on his desk and folds it into the breast pocket of his jacket before he leaves the room.)

**_Three hours out:_ **

Tracker guns the engine and they rip up the highway, ion engines slamming them through the thin Martian air. The cop cars chasing them are fading into the distance as the suped-up engines in the  _ Hangman _ jet them across the desert towards the launch pad.

Adaine Abernant sits in the passenger seat clutching at her arms. It seemed to be an awful shock to her system to suddenly get unplugged from Bastion City. Ten years as the neural interface for an entire city isn’t something that she is going to recover easily from. 

“Alright, miss?” Tracker asks her, switches over to autopilot so she can grab the medkit from the glove box. Adaine is bleeding from the palms of her hands where Tracker had to rip the conduits out of their sockets when the security lockdown had latched them in. 

“Who-” her voice is garbled from lack of use. Tracker privately thinks it's a miracle she's even alive, let alone conscious and talking. “What’s going on?" 

"My name is Tracker O'Shaughnessey,” Tracker says as she efficiently bandages Adaine’s palms, flashes a light into her eyes, takes her pulse. “I’m a retrieval specialist for the Seacaster Corporation. I was hired to free you from the mainframe of Bastion City." 

"Bastion City!” Adaine jolts in her seat, looks out the viewport to the back, starts to scrabble at the door’s latches. “No, you can’t, they’ll-they’ll die without me!" 

"Miss,” Tracker says, grabs her wrists to keep her from trying to escape. “Miss, you were kidnapped by them almost ten years ago and forced to serve as the internal network for the city. We freed you." 

Adaine just stares at her with blank, horrified eyes. "The entire city’s systems were keyed into me - don’t you understand, there are no manual controls to anything, we have to -" 

She’s cut off by the sonic boom as the bubble around Bastion City splits and crumbles, the internal pressure no longer regulated by her mind. They slam against their seats with the blast but the Hangman rips on, kicking up dust in the low atmosphere. Adaine screams in pain, scrabbles at the door but the autopilot keeps it locked and her long fingernails just crack and peel as her weak fingers push at the controls. 

"It's too late for them," Tracker says but there's a bit of a quaver to her voice. She didn't know taking Adaine would destroy the entire city's structure. Adaine must have been wired into every system for it to implode like that - electric grid, gate mechanics, air regulation. Bastion City had a population of five hundred, six hundred thousand people, the only major city this far north on Mars. All dead. Maybe some of them, the ones who kidnapped hundreds of young girls to wire them into computer systems and keep them barely alive on IV drips of nutrient, deserved it. But most of them...most of them would have been living in relative poverty, working in call centers or factory jobs. 

Gorgug should have told her what unplugging Adaine would do to the city. Tracker didn't sign up for this when she agreed to the job.

Adaine's chest heaves in panic and she goes unconscious. Tracker checks to be sure she's still breathing, but her heartbeat is still thudding away in her hollow chest. She'll survive the journey to the ship. They'll handle the rest when they can.

**(** **_two hours, thirty minutes out_ ** : 

There's a comm in to Mrs. Glitterdew's office from Phobos, but it's too garbled for the system to decipher it. Penelope doubts it's anything interesting, it's a server bank of a planet, they're probably grumbly about coolant supplies or something. The secretary salary she gets from G-Ent isn't enough to deal with shit like this. She bins the comm and puts in a new order to restock the site. It can't possibly be anything that important. **)**

  
  


**_Two hours out:_ **

Fabian plugs one of the cleaned up flash drives into a laptop. No sense in ruining the ship's computer with accidental malware. Riz is lying on the couch and Kristen is piloting them into the asteroid belt for cover. The files are clean, as far as Fabian can tell, but he's no expert like Fig is. 

He starts opening them and. 

He opens more. Dozens of files, eating up his memory to hold them open at the same time, but Riz sprinted out of a burning server farm with the details of the entire Glitterdew Enterprise empire. Shell corporations, bank accounts, employee records, locations, names, passwords, details, it's all sitting in these six flash drives. 

Fabian sits back in shock. He owns stock in some of the shell companies, knows SeaCorp does business with some. This is everything. And when they get Adaine out - 

Oh. 

_ Oh _ . Gorgug is  _ very _ good at his job. 

Fabian dumps all of his family's stock in any company listed in the briefing, then clears out Kristen and Riz's accounts as well. He quietly buys them into some competitors, just some small investments here and there. Nothing that will ping as too suspicious but will likely start turning a healthy profit in the next few weeks. 

There's a lot to go through but Fabian didn't major in sociology for nothing. He's good at this kind of bulk handling, even better at knowing what to do with it. There are lists, lots of lists, for Fig to handle later with her encryption. Law enforcement agencies to tip off, news outlets to drop stories with, locations to raid for missing persons long thought dead. 

They're going to fucking destroy the Glitterdews. It's what they fucking deserve. Fabian's going to choke the life out of the stupid fuck when he gets his hands on him. 

Gorgug pings them with a location and they glide through the dust-choked field towards the rendezvous point. It's empty, as expected, except Kristen picks up on a little silver canister which they scoop up in the mag field. There's an encrypted message inside -  _ Stay put, retrieval team arriving at 13:00 galactic standard time. Expect a pickup right after, we're bouncing out of warp to get you and won't have a lot of margin for error. Shields up, we know you were followed _ . 

  
  


**_One hour out:_ **

Adaine stumbles as she exits the car. Her head feels empty for the first time since Before. Everything hurts, burns, itches, aches. Tracker catches her before she can hit the steel-plated ground of the cargo bay of the ship they pulled into. 

"Careful there, miss," Tracker says, bundling her up into her arms and carrying her towards the doors into the ship proper. 

"Adaine," Adaine says. "My name is Adaine Abernant. Who are you?" 

Tracker grins, really properly face-splitting grins. "That's good, that's really good you remember. I'm Tracker. I work for the Seacasters." 

"The Seacasters?" It hurts to have to think manually, to not have searches pop up in her mind in an instant. She knows the name, knows it's important to her somehow. Someone from before. Someone tall and strong and smelling of woodsmoke. Someone in fencing gear, someone driving the car she was just in, someone - "Fabian?" 

"Yes," Tracker says. She sets Adaine down in a medbay and the scanners start cataloging her injuries. They pop up on the screen and Tracker flips through them, brow furrowed. "I was hired to retrieve you, along with - " 

A short girl with matted brown hair with purple ends bursts into the room and then freezes, staring at Adaine. She's wearing a silver flight suit and the biggest headphones Adaine's ever seen. 

"Fig," Adaine says. Reflex, really. Her head hurts with the remembering of it all, countless nights at raves and house shows and concerts, Fig plays her new EPs for Adaine, rooming together at Aguefort Academy, classes meals, dinners, that one time they made out but it was too weird so they decided to not do it again. Fig writing countless lines of code late into the night, working on her computer science degree through breakfasts and lunches, always always working but always having time for Adaine. 

Fig bursts into tears and runs to her side. She can't touch Adaine because the robodoc has sealed her in to start healing her, but she presses her hand to the glass closest to Adaine's hand. "Adaine," she says. "You remember me?" 

"Yeah," Adaine says. She can't cry, she's too dehydrated, and her retinal implants won't let her anyways. She wishes she could. It felt good to cry over something, once. "You're pretty hard to forget." 

"It's going to knock you out in a minute, Adaine," Tracker says, still tapping at the screen. "We're going to remove what implants we can now and hopefully start repairing the malnutrition damage to your bones." 

"I'll be here when you wake up," Fig says, swears, and she's shaking so hard. "I promise I'll be here." 

Adaine closes her eyes and a needle slides under the skin of her forearm and she's gone.

**zero:**

Gorgug stands on the observation deck of the  _ Zephriel _ , watches the roiling dark of pocket space vanish as the ship materializes. For just a second he can see the cloudy mess of the asteroid belt illuminated by the ship's lights, and then they're back in the void. It's gone again and they're in the darkness of space again, in orbit around Proxima Centauri A. 

ZELDA chimes over the intercom. "Six aboard and accounted for, sir." 

"Thank you, ZELDA." Gorgug lets out the breath he's been holding for the past two days as he watched the operation he coordinated come together. 

Then he runs, takes the turbolift down into the bowels of the ship. He bursts into the cargo bay to see his family standing there, waiting for the turbolift he just sprung out of. Kristen's holding Adaine's lifeless body to her chest and she's crying and for a second Gorgug thinks - but no, she's breathing, faintly, just pale and hollowed looking. 

They're all looking at him but he's only looking at her. Ten years. Ten fucking years. 

Kristen offers her up to Gorgug and he takes her gently (she's so light, she's never been this light before, there are months and years of recovery before her). He cradles her to his chest, drags his eyes over the still existing implants, the puckered skin where some have recently been removed. 

"We got it all," Riz says, and he finally looks at the rest of them. Fig holds up a fist full of thumb drives and her eyes burn with hate even as she's grinning. "Everything on the server." 

"The city died," Tracker says and all eyes flit to her in wide shock. "Bastion City's gone." She looks almost as hollow as Adaine does. 

"Biz did that," Gorgug says. "There were failsafes in place. He manually disabled them to cover his ass. We have proof. Their deaths were not your fault, nor Adaine's fault, nor anyone else here's." 

Tracker sobs and collapses into Kristen. Fabian's face is a renaissance painting of hatred and disgust, lip curled cartoonishly. "Let's burn this motherfucker to the ground." 

"Let's get started then." 

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [here](https://elsie-writes.tumblr.com)


End file.
